Beatrice Forbes Robertson Hale granddaughter of Joseph Knight FRA, daughter to Ian Forbes Robertson, niece to the great Johnston Forbes Robertson and mother to my grandmother Sanchia. This is my family legend. But it is not only my legend; because my great grandmother and grandmother wrote a book aptly styled with the same name. Great names pop out of it all over the place and if you will forgive the name dropping I might hint that George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Lilly Langtry, Ellen Terry, Mrs Pat Campbell and Henry Irving all make their appearances. Even my very own idol Oscar Wilde plays a small part of having ‘dandled’ my great grandmother on his knee.

The book is however about an era in which the family travailed; about a time when married #Womenwriters were denigrated for dishonoring their husbands by being published. Why you ask? Because if a wife brought money into the home by the work of her own hand, then the inference was the husband was too weak to do so. With this in mind, actresses were often viewed similarly. The great names as we know them today have been illuminated by the passing of time. Please do not misunderstand me, they had reputation and were sought out for their company but they were not considered of good breeding! This was also the time of the suffragette movement, and Beatrice passionate about the hope that this might bring to her kindred spirits retired from acting and spoke all of United Kingdom and United States of America on the potential of women having equal voice. She never condoned the aggressive nature of some of her peers, but spoke of the matters closer to home. The chance to intellectually interact, to recognize that the female gender had qualities beyond dressing for occasion. She wrote #WhatWomenWant which became compulsory educational reading.

I would like to leave you with a few last words from Beatrice herself, never before published:

“Life seems good to me; a chance to view the great Peep-show infinitely worth while. It is indeed difficult for me to understand why, with so much to learn and see, anyone should not be thankful for the opportunity. I am glad to have tasted it all, and look forward to a few more years of remembering the past, watching the present and – for the future – Hope lurks always in Pandora’s box.

I was looking into a new book on www:amazon.co.uk that has come out called The Wall by William Sutcliffe, has anyone read it yet? It’s a fascinating tale of a young boy who’s football goes over this wall. The problem is that on the other side of that wall is a place that no one goes or never comes back from. He climbs over the boundary wall to search for it and finds a flattened house that was once “the home of people from the other side” and, beside it, the entrance to a dark tunnel. Crawling through the tunnel, he emerges into a wholly unfamiliar world.

All well and good you might say, just another fantasy story, but no this is not the case. Although Sutcliffe doesn’t tell us that the boy, Joshua, is an Israeli or that the people on the other side of the wall are Palestinian. There are no shortage of markers to locate the knowing reader topographically or historically: the barren land and olive trees, the wall itself, with new pristine settlements on one side and crowded alleyways on the other. Sutcliffe has set himself a challenge in writing this novel, which is “crossover” in two senses of the word – both YA and adult, aimed both at those who know and those who don’t. There are moments in the first half when he falls a little short of pulling off the feat of balancing a boy’s adventure tale – filled with chases and hiding places and journeys in the rat-filled dark – with the more introspective story of a young man coming to understand the world in which he lives. When Joshua returns home to Amarias for the first time, it’s hard – even for the adult reader – not to want the book to hurry up and send him back through the tunnel into the world of adventure again.

I find it fascinating that an author would take up such a tricky task of bringing a child through to a young man in a violent and unpredictable world. I admire him for his effort and applaud his achievement, is this something you would like to see soon? Leave me a post and let me know what you think..?